Sunday, May 15, 2016

"What a beautifully, lovingly constructed book! It
conveys not only the variety and ideals of the ecovillage movement, but
the heart of it as well. Kosha and Leila's book affirms the importance
of ecovillages not just as an inconsequential alternative in the
margins, but as an invitation to transform every place into an
ecological collaboration between humans and the rest of nature." - Charles Eisenstein

During
the GEN 20+Summit in Findhorn Kosha Joubert and Leila Dregger presented
the new GEN book about ecovillages worldwide, which they had written
with the help of many longterm ecovillage members who contributed their
very personal stories, thoughts, experiences, adventures, failures,
learnings and successes. The book can now be ordered. Everybody
interested in social and ecological change and building a global
alternative should know this source of experience and wisdom.

This book introduces a selection of ecovillage projects from all over
the world. The editors have aimed to give a taste of their richness and
diversity with examples from Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and
North America. Most of the chapters are based on interviews with
founders or long-standing members of ecovillage communities; while a few
chapters are about regional or national networks of ecovillage
transition. The book sets out both to honour successes, but also to
learn from difficulties and failure.

As well as serving as an inspiration to its readers, the book is also
intended as a learning resource. At the end of each chapter, the
editors have given a few keywords, listing some of the best approaches
used by each ecovillage, for example, in developing a water treatment
facility, building a straw bale house or supporting groups of people in
their endeavours. You can find out more about these solutions in the
GEN Solution Library - there are links in the book.

“Ecovillages have long served a vital function as the
laboratories of a resilient future, where solutions are tested, tweaked,
adjusted. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but it’s in the
“what if?” spirit that their genius lies. Kosha Joubert and Leila
Dregger’s new book celebrates the remarkable diversity to be found in
the eco-village movement, and their insights resonate far beyond the
ecovillages themselves”. - Rob Hopkins, Founder of the Transition Network

“Your heart will soar as you revel in this treasure trove
of evidence that a new and better future is not only possible but
happening NOW all over the world where ordinary people have taken
matters into their own hands, building vibrant, loving, sustainable
communities... even national governments are beginning to take them
seriously enough to support their growth... You will be filled with new
inspiration and implementable ideas, so spread the book itself as far
and wide as you can!”- Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, evolution biologist & futurist, author of Gaia’s Dance

Nowadays, ecovillages are widely accepted as living and learning
centers, as lighthouses for social and ecological sustainability in
their regions, as alternative to the destructive mainstream lifestyle
that has brought the planet to the edge of extinction. However, 20 or 30
years ago, nobody knew the word ecovillage. Many intentional
communities that existed were regarded as dropout groups, hippie oases
and they were, here and there, just beginning to cooperate with other
sectors of society such as politics, economy or media. It took some time
before the world acknowledged the many solutions that the pioneer
generation has been testing in their remote places. It also took a while
before the communities, with their different approaches to an
alternative lifestyle, started to regard themselves as a global movement
- diverse, with different experiences, but with the same aim and
principles.
It needed people in the projects who were ready to look at the
bigger, the global, picture and not only their own philosophies,
situations and challenges. The communities had to come together and
start to form community amongst themselves: to share, to learn from each
other, even correct each other and form a common platform.

The concept of ecovillages first arose in the late 1980s, with the
intention of offering an alternative to a culture of consumerism and
exploitation. Combining a supportive and high-quality social and
cultural environment with a low-impact way of life, they have become
precious playgrounds in which groups of committed people can experiment
to find solutions for some of the challenges we face globally.
Ecovillages are now part of a worldwide movement for social and
environmental justice and have become regional and national beacons of
inspiration for the social, cultural, ecological and economic revival of
both rural and urban areas.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

This site is your gateway to implementing climate-smart agriculture. It will help you get started and guide you right through to implementation on the ground, connecting you with all the resources you need to dig deeper.

Friday, May 6, 2016

Interested person can now sign up and take the REDD+ Academy e-course here: http://unccelearn.org. Launched by the UN-REDD Programme in November 2015, the course is self-paced, free of charge and conducted in English.

Developing and implementing REDD+ goes beyond the forestry sector and
requires input from a broad spectrum of informed stakeholders. The key
term here is “informed”. Many stakeholders continue to feel challenged
and overwhelmed by unfamiliar concepts and terminology, and often find
it difficult to distinguish between facts and opinions. The demand for
capacity building continues remains high. The UN-REDD Programme
responded to the demand, with a series of regional and national REDD+
Academies. But clearly, face-to-face training courses can only reach a
limited number of people. The Programme therefore developed a REDD+
Academy e-course in English with support from the One UN Climate Change
Learning Partnership (UN CC:Learn). The course provides access to
high-quality learning on REDD+ to an unlimited number of people.

In describing the REDD+ Academy learning materials, Achim Steiner,
United Nations Under-Secretary-General and United Nations Environment
Programme Executive Director stated, “The modules presented in the
e-Academy will equip you with the requisite knowledge to better
understand the various components of REDD+ planning and implementation,
and provide you with tools to promote the implementation of national
REDD+ activities in your country. I encourage all of you to apply the
knowledge you will gain over the course duration and to do your part to
make REDD+ a national and a global success!” (Link to the video is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWipm8pAUVk&feature=youtu.be).

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Disobedience is a new film about a new phase of the climate
movement: courageous action that is being taken on the front lines of
the climate crisis on every continent, led by regular people fed up with
the power and pollution of the fossil fuel industry.

Disobedience is the story of the struggle to save the world.

Disobedience tells the David vs Goliath tales of
front line leaders around the world risking life and limb in the fight
for a liveable climate.

Interwoven with this riveting verité footage are the most renowned
voices in the global conversation around social movements and climate
justice for a series that is personal, passionate and powerful.
The stakes could not be higher, nor the missions more critical.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Money is a powerful driver in the modern world, and for the most
part, we’ve elevated it to the point of necessity. However, we do not
need money to live healthy, fulfilling lives on this planet. The current
structure of society is reliant on the constant trade of money; to get
rid of money would mean a complete restructuring of how we interact with
society.

If we could shift into the mentality of inner connected communities
that exist harmoniously around the world; then the need for money truly
disappears.

1. Work Becomes Play

When
we’re all focusing on living off the earth, the idea of a ‘job’ ceases
to exist. We don’t need people waking up to clean up waste, do
accounting or govern cities. The people become the government and the
work we do is in support of each other and the planet.
Many of the jobs at this level would be supportive – water supply,
growing food, maintaining, and literally building the structures of the
new earth.
For many people nowadays, career choices are all about the social
ranking of what they do and the potential for earning. Without these
drivers, many people would choose only to do their menial chores for
society and focus their time on family or other creative and learning
pursuits.

2. People will do what they Love

Where people do choose to go into fixed vocations, you’ll find that it is because they love and are drawn to this work.
Without the financial and social status drivers behind them, you’ll
find healers drawn to healing and medicine, teachers drawn to teaching
and the spiritual placed back into temples where they can uplift the
community at large and contribute meaningfully.
In addition, we’ll more than likely see huge surges and advancements
in these fields, because the people operating here no longer have
limitations like ‘does the client want this’ or ‘can the client afford
this’?
Take away the financial limitations of each person and you have a
medical field that can pull out all the stops to save the lives of every
person who needs help – not just those that can afford it.

3. More time for family

The
endless treadmill that most of us are running on daily leaves us very
little time to enjoy the families we clothe and house.
When survival is taken off the table as an issue, you’ll find that
you have more energy to spend with your family – more time to enjoy them
in your life.
Likewise, your working time contribution will be much more limited
than what it would be in a free economy, which will give you more time
to spend on your family – instead of all the time you dedicate to trying
to make ends meet at the moment.

4. The majority of your stress disappears

How much of your modern stress is made up of survival issues? How
am I going to pay the bills, buy food, pay rent, pay my creditors?
Take away the survival issues and all you are left with is your
health, relationships, spirituality and how much you will grow and
express yourself creatively going forward.
How much easier would your life be if you never had to worry about
money, food, medication or a roof over your head? How much happier would
you and your family be?
How many of the other stressors in your life are driven by the
money/survival issue as well? What other areas of your life would become
easier?

5. Education becomes Real

Without
the mad scrabble for wealth and social standing – as well as securing
your future – we wouldn’t place half as much emphasis on education.

Education becomes a shared experience with everyone of all ages.
Incredible learning can happen outside the classroom that only
experience can teach.

When everyone becomes a teacher, then everyone is a student of each
other. Learning doesn’t become impossible for them many who can’t afford
to go to school. It is a birth right for all of us.

Associate Professor, Centre for Urban Research (GUSS, RMIT), RMIT University

What types of communities do the best job of living with a
minimal impact on the planet? I asked myself this question when I read a
recent article on The Conversation, which argued that even if everyone on Earth lived in an ecovillage we would still be using too many resources.
I am more optimistic — some ecovillages provide a much better blueprint than others.

As a 2013 study of 14 ecovillages
by US political scientist Karen Litfin shows, ecovillages can be
regarded as “pioneer species”. They show people how to improve their
sustainability: the ecovillages Liftin studied used 10–50% fewer
resources than their home-country averages and, being whole communities,
were more influential than a single sustainable household.

Litfin’s assessment took in a wide range of factors – ecological,
economic, even psychological – but one example of how ecovillages show
the way forward is in power consumption.

Mainstream households tend to rely on national or regional supplies
of gas or electricity, with no (or little) control over their sources.
In places like Victoria, which has a very emissions-intensive power
sector, this can make it difficult to make sustainable choices.
However, ecovillage neighbours who have banded together to access
renewable energy, say solar or wind power, can make off-grid
environmental savings.

While there are financial (and other) barriers to setting up
environmentally sound residential neighbourhoods, there are useful rules
of thumb. In general, small is beautiful and sharing is efficient. One
simply cannot fit as much “stuff” into a smaller house, and sharing
accommodation often economises on consumption of goods and services.

Some ecovillages shame others in reducing their environmental
footprint. Where ecovillages re-inhabit and renovate old buildings, they
save on resources. A good example is the postcapitalist eco-industrial Calafou colony, northwest of Barcelona, which houses some 30 people in an old textile factory complex.

Members of another community that I have stayed at, Ganas
in New York City, live in renovated residential buildings and operate
several second-hand businesses at which residents work. Residents at Twin Oaks
in Virginia, where I worked for three weeks, have a surprising level of
collective sufficiency, with residents working on farming and making
hammocks and tofu to sell, the proceeds of which are shared between the
group.

Such experiments can be scaled up, settling residents in ex-commercial and ex-industrial premises — effectively shrinking cities by encouraging higher-density, more sustainable collective communities.Crops and solar panels at Twin Oaks in Virginia.Author provided

The global village

This feeds into the idea of “planned economic contraction” or “degrowth”, which as Samuel Alexander argued on The Conversation is necessary in order to live sustainably. But I don’t share his pessimism about the ability of ecovillages to show us a way towards this sustainable life.

An analysis of Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland showed that an average resident travels by air twice as much as an average Scot, yet their total travel and overall ecological footprint was half the Scottish and UK averages.

Residents of Findhorn and of another UK ecovillage, Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), make significant savings in terms of car travel. It follows that just by avoiding air travel, these residents would have even more environmentally sound practices.

Managing without money?

Members of ecovillages such as Twin Oaks not only share “one purse”, but also complement their efforts at collective sufficiency with minimal use of money. (Avoiding money is part of the culture of squatters generally.) Members of Calafou put in money to the community on the basis of their individual capacity but share governance and benefits equally. Here social and environmental values dominate.

In contrast, money is the principle on which capitalism revolves. If we reduce consumption — and we will need to, to become sustainable — then production has to be reduced. But capitalist producers have no successful operating systems for shrinking. Most often, when consumption decreases it results in unemployment and austerity, rather than orderly degrowth.

Money pressures us to opt for more rather than less, or else risk poverty and powerlessness. Thus it applies a systemic pressure to expand. Growth is not simply a result of people’s greed – even not-for-profit cooperatives aim to create a monetary surplus. How would you run a business or your household using money income in a shrinking market? What would happen to prices and savings?
Many suggest a guaranteed minimum income, but the value of the currency will prove unstable in such conditions and, anyway, what really matters to us is what we can purchase with that income (meaning that prices matter).

Such questions lead us to the conclusion that strategies for degrowth must leap not only beyond capitalism but also beyond money. This is the strength of Litfin’s focus on ecology, community and consciousness, incorporating skills which we need to replace production for trade on the principle of money.

In the future, collectively sufficient ecovillages could operate environmentally efficiently on the basis of direct democracy and arrange production and exchange within the commons they lived off without the use of money. Instead, ecovillagers would make non-monetary exchanges, where necessary, on the basis of social and environmental values.

The fields of Konohana Ecovillage all lie under the watchful eye of Mt. Fuji (Image courtesy of Karen Litfin).

After twenty years of teaching global environmental politics at a
major research university, watching the state of the world go from bad
to worse, I became increasingly curious: “Who is devising ways of living
that could work for the long haul?” My research led me to ecovillages:
communities the world over that are seeding micro-societies within the
husk of the old. I traveled to 5 continents, living in 14 ecovillages
and doing in-depth interviews with their members over the course of a
year, and publishing the results in Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community.
My sampling reflects their diversity: rural and urban; rich, poor and
middle class; secular and spiritual. I was also curious to know what, if
anything, unifies the astonishingly diverse Global Ecovillage Network.

I learned that “sustainability” varies with context. Ecovillagers in
the Global North focus on reducing social alienation, consumption and
waste, whereas those in the Global South focus on village-based
employment, gender equality and food sovereignty. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, is an island of frugality in the heart of Southern California’s consumer culture, whereas Colufifa,
a Senegal-based village network, is primarily concerned with hunger
prevention. Yet both are drawn to bicycles and permaculture, suggesting
that ‘sustainability’ has some common ground in east Hollywood and west
Africa.

Most important, I found evidence of an emerging common worldview in
the global ecovillage movement, including these basic tenets:

The web of life is sacred, and humanity is an integral part of that web.

Global trends are approaching a crisis point.

Positive change will come primarily from the bottom up.

Community is an adventure in relational living—ecologically, socially, and psychologically.

As a consequence of these beliefs, ecovillagers are unusually
sensitive to the consequences of their actions, both near and far, and
unusually open to sharing. If I had to choose one word to express the
essence of ecovillage culture, it would be sharing. Because
ecovillages in the Global North share material resources, both their
consumption and incomes are quite low compared to their home country
averages. At Earthaven in North Carolina and Sieben Linden
in Germany, for instance, members had annual incomes of less than
$12,000. Despite being far below the poverty line, they described their
lives as “rich” and “abundant.”

Material factors like self-built homes and home-grown food tell only
part of the story. A more encompassing explanation is the prevalence of
sharing—not only of property and vehicles, but of the intangibles that
define community: ideas, skills, dreams, stories, and deep
introspection. Ecovillagers consistently reported that human
relationships are both the most challenging and most rewarding
aspects of ecovillage life. “Being here is like being in a fire,” said
one. “Your lack of trust, your anger, your family neuroses—everything
that separates you from the world comes out here!” Ecovillages are, as
much as anything, laboratories for personal and interpersonal
transformation.
In many ways, my global journey was a paradoxical one. As an
international relations scholar acutely aware of the global nature of
our problems, why was I touring micro-communities in search of a viable
future? Even including the 15,000 Sri Lankan member villages in Sarvodaya—by
far the largest member of the Global Ecovillage Network—less than 0.05%
of the world’s population lives in an ecovillage. Time is far too short
to construct ecovillages for 7 billion people but not—as the book’s
final chapter, “Scaling It Up,” suggests—too short to apply their
lessons in our neighborhoods, cities and towns, countries, and even at
the level of international policy. Given that some of Earth’s
life-support systems may have passed the tipping point, success is far from guaranteed. What is guaranteed, however, is a sense of shared adventure and worthy purpose—qualities I found in abundance in ecovillages.
—-This post was written by Karen Litfin, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. You can read the first chapter of her book Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Communityhere.

The forest provides firewood for the 40,000
Tamil villagers who live around Auroville, founded in 1968 in South
India. Auroville is now home to 2,000 people from 43 different countries
and is one of the few places on Earth where biodiversity is actually
increasing.

Karen Litfin is a University of Washington associate professor of political science and author of the book “Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community.” She answered a few questions about the book, and her work, for UW Today.Q: What is the main message of “Ecovillages”?A: After teaching global environmental politics for
two decades and watching planetary conditions deteriorate, I grew
disenchanted with top-down solutions. I also grew tired of making my
students anxious, depressed and guilt-ridden. If our ways of living are
unraveling planetary life-support systems, then we must answer the
question: How, then, shall we live?
My search for models led me on a one-year journey around the world to
ecovillages, intentional communities aspiring to live sustainably.
Living in 14 ecovillages on five continents taught me that not only is
another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the
world over.

“Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community” was published by Polity.

The point, however, is not that we all should live in ecovillages;
rather, we need to learn from them and scale up their lessons to
existing social structures, from the household to our neighborhoods to
our cities, nations and even to the level of global governance.Q: How did you choose which ecovillages to visit?A: I took a year to map my journey and arrange the
logistics. I selected for “success,” which I conceived as an amalgam of
factors including longevity, size and reputation. Most communities I
visited, for instance, had a 10-year history with at least 100 members.
Because I wanted to understand the movement’s global character, I also selected for diversity: rural, urban and suburban; global north/global south;
rich, poor, and middle class; secular, religious and spiritual:
high-tech and low-tech. Across this enormous diversity, I then looked
for the common strands.Q: You write amusingly that the term “ecovillage” may conjure
images of “shabby rural outposts populated by long-haired iconoclasts,”
but that you found them less easy to pigeonhole. How instead would you
describe them, and what do they have in common?A: I saw a few scruffy shacks but for the most part,
I found tidy, smallish homes that reflected a kind of organic beauty. I
also found unusually capable and articulate people committed to
integrating the four dimensions of sustainability: ecology, economics,
community and consciousness.
I learned that “sustainability” varies with context. Ecovillagers in
the global north focus on reducing social alienation, consumption and
waste, whereas the global south focuses on “sustainabilizing”
traditional rural villages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, is an island of frugality in the heart of consumer culture, whereas Colufifa, a Senegal-based village network, works to prevent hunger.
Yet both are drawn to bicycles and permaculture, suggesting common ground between east Hollywood to west Africa.
Most important, I found ecovillages embrace these basic tenets:

The web of life is sacred and humanity is an integral part of that web.

Global trends are approaching a crisis point.

Positive change will come primarily from the bottom up.

If I had to encapsulate ecovillage culture in one word, it would be sharing. Because ecovillages share material resources, both their consumption and incomes can be far below their home country averages.
Material factors like self-built homes and home-grown food tell only
part of the story. More important is the prevalence of sharing — not
only of property and vehicles, but of the intangibles that define
community: ideas, skills, challenges, and celebrations.

Q: How does the ecovillage movement, if we can call it that, differ from “back to nature” trends of previous decades?A: Ecovillages are far more integrated into society
and many of them are in cities. Rather than separating themselves,
ecovillages tend to be educational centers; their members tend to be
socially and politically engaged. The Global Ecovillage Network, for instance, works with the United Nations and the European Union.Q: You note people saying, “That’s all fine for those lucky ecovillagers, but what about the rest of us?” How do you reply?A: We should understand that being an ecovillager is
more a consequence of inspiration and hard work than luck. And, because
sustainability is the nonnegotiable precondition for inhabiting Earth
over the long haul, “the rest of us” would be wise to learn from
ecovillages.Q: This has been a very personal journey for you. How has this work changed you?A: First, the journey gave me a strong sense of
grounded hope: I have seen and touched some seedlings for a viable
future. Second, while ecovillages are not for everyone, some people
yearn for the intimacy, focus and integrated solutions of ecovillage
life. I learned that I am such a person.
Third, I wanted to write a book that would be both emotionally and
intellectually engaging, which required learning a whole new way of
writing — and therefore thinking.Q: Based on what you’ve learned, what suggestions would you offer to people looking for sustainability in everyday life? A: Beyond the green practices that most of us are
familiar with —conservation, recycling, minimizing fossil fuel
consumption, etc.— I would emphasize the social dimension of
sustainability.
The stronger the sense of community, the more we are willing to
share. Beyond our households and neighborhoods, we need to scale up the
lessons to every level of governance.

Photos by Karen Litfin.

Karen Litfin was “thoroughly impressed” by her first stop,
Earthhaven, a 320-acre off-the-grid community in the Blue Ridge
Mountains of North Carolina. In its 15 years, she said, the community
has created “a rapidly evolving expertise in forestry, a range of
natural building styles, 100 percent energy and water self-sufficiency
and several thriving farms — all in what was once raw forest.” This the
Council Hall, a 13-side structure built by the community.

The forest provides firewood for the 40,000 Tamil villagers who live
around Auroville. “Founded in 1968 upon a severely eroded plateau in
south India, the first order of business for the pioneers was to
revitalize the land. Three million trees later, Auroville is home to
over 2,000 people from 43 different countries and is one of the few
places on Earth where biodiversity is actually increasing,” Litfin
writes.

Larger homes are built with compressed earth bricks, made from a
simple machine pioneered by Auroville’s Earth Institute, and run on
solar electricity.

Litfin attends a meeting of village leaders in Colufifa, in Senegal
and the Gambia. Colufifa is not an ecovillage exactly, Litfin notes —
more a Senegal-based network of 350 West African villages seeing to
become self-sufficient. Meeting topics ranged from plastic bags clogging
local waterways to poultry vaccination programs.

Sekou Bodian teaches high school biology in Colufifa by day and,
with the help of a light bulb and a small generator, plants trees at
night. By his estimate, he has planted 300,000 trees in his lifetime.

Findhorn, in Moray, on the northeast coast of Scotland, was formed
in 1962, Litfin writes, “when three spiritual seekers with no previous
gardening experience transformed a barren, windy bluff on the North Seat
into a cornucopia.” Litfin herself spent some time working in the
garden.

Konohana Family, Litfin writes, is an ecovillage “that sits under
the towering presence of Japan’s Mt. Fuji (and) takes its name from the
goddess once thought to inhabit this venerable mountain.” The village
is almost completely food self-sufficient, and here residents prepare
organic vegetarian meals for hundreds of people in the region. As of
2012, the village comprised about 58 adults and 25 children.

L.A. Eco-village was founded in 1992 in a multiethnic neighborhood
in East Hollywood. “As a consequence,” Litfin writes, the village “is
the most ethnically diverse community I visited.”

Litfin writes that she at first glance, the village’s two renovated
tenement buildings were unremarkable. But around back, she found the
village’s “lush permaculture garden is alive with free-range chickens, a
compost pile, and dozens of varieties of fruit trees and vegetables.”

“In a country where agrochemicals are used intensively, Sarvodaya
trains farmers to cultivate rice (shown here) and other crops
organically,” writes Litfin. “When people ask how many ecovillages there
are in the world, I tell them it depends upon whether you count the
15,000 Sri Lankan villages working with Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest
nongovernmental organization.”

Litfin writes of this off-the-grid German ecovillage, “Its
commitment to one-planet living and a spacious rural environment make
Sieben Linden an ideal hands-on learning community for classes and
workshops. Founded in 1997 and named for Linden trees on the land, the
village is one of several that Litfin says “sprouted in the fertile soil
of the East after German reunification.

Svanholm, a rural Danish community, is “a prosperous and highly
functional commune,” Litfin writes, with most of its 85 adults and 56
children “living in small ‘home groups’ in this enormous 1749 manor
house.” She adds that the commune’s 988 acres devoted to organic farming
“dwarf those of most ecovillages and its farmers have played a pivotal
role in setting Danish — and therefore European Union — organic
standards.”

UfaFabrik, in the heart of West Berlin, was founded in 1979 when
about 100 peace activists took over an abandoned Universal Film Studio
site, Litfin writes. “Eventually, they gained title to the land and
transformed the old film studio into a 160,000-square-foot
state-of-the-art ecological demonstration site” visited by up to 200,000
people a year.

All members participate in communal work in this community west of
Berlin founded in 1991 called ZEGG, or the Center for Experimental
Cultural Design (or Zentrum für esperimentelle Gesellschaftsgestaltung).
Here, members raise a big tent for the community’s annual summer camp.
Litfin writes that for 15 years, the community has offered courses on a
group process to explore feelings developed there called The Forum, “as a
tool for fostering greater self-awareness and social bonding.”

Litfin writes, “Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over.”

When reading Karen Litfin’s inspiring book, I was reminded of my
recent visit to the Lancaster Cohousing community on the edge of the
village of Halton in northwest England. For more than 10 years, young
professionals have been battling with planners, bankers, architects and
local residents to build some 40 eco-homes in a rural location, centred
around a common house, which features shared facilities such as kitchen,
laundry and pantry. Community members also co-run car-sharing and
food-buying cooperatives.

The UK’s planning laws are not exactly conducive to setting up such
sustainable ventures, as the Lammas community in Pembrokeshire also
found out. Setting up shop there was even more complicated, as the
community hoped to take over agricultural land and live on it as
smallholders, which is impossible within the current legal framework.

Thanks to devolution, however, Wales now has an innovative
sustainable development scheme called One Wales: One Planet, which
enables rural, land-based livelihoods to be created. To meet its
planning permission, Lammas must follow strict rules to minimise its
impact on the ecosystem. The community achieves this by following
permacultural, off-grid design standards, mimicking nature to
sustainably manage the land, in stark contrast to the monocultures of
contemporary industrial agriculture.

Lammas and Lancaster Cohousing are the sort of eco-villages that Litfin, a political scientist at the University of Washington,
would love. They are part of a growing movement of intentional
communities experimenting with new ways of sustainable living. In her
quest to learn more about such communities, Litfin travelled the world,
visiting 14 ecovillages on five continents. This book is her way of
making sense of this research experience, as well as part of a very
personal growth story. In lively, honest and reflective prose, she
offers deep insight into how this research project has been part of her
own mission of living more sustainably.
While Litfin provides us with a range of practical information about
the principles of ecovillage organising – including countless nuggets of
inspiration that will be useful to anyone, not just those intending to
live in communities – she also puts forward a theoretical framework for
analysing these emerging ways of sustainable living.

What she calls her “four windows into sustainability” – ecology,
economics, community and consciousness – are not particularly new. The
triple bottom line and three-legged stool approaches have defined
sustainability as the balancing of ecology, economy and society for a
long time. Litfin, however, adds the “inner dimension of sustainability,
the deeper questions of meaning and cosmological belonging that have
informed human existence for ages”.
Their thoughts dominated by economics – jobs, healthcare and
education costs – many people in so-called developed countries have lost
this dimension of consciousness, as well as their deep connection to
nature. The natural world is more likely to enter people’s lives through
consumption – eg, organic supermarket food – than via a real connection
to the land.
Although the ecovillages Litfin visited are mostly based in developed
countries – housing well-educated professionals, like me, who want to
exit the rat race by reconnecting to people and the land – it is
important to bear in mind that many developing countries are still
dominated by rural, land-based communities. Their livelihoods are often
threatened by large-scale so-called “development” projects: mining,
dams, agri-businesses and forest plantations.

Any attempt to reconnect to the land in the rich world should be
celebrated, but we must not overlook the struggles faced by poor rural
communities trying to carve out a land-based living at the edges of
industrialised capitalism. For the rich to go back to the land is
important. Equally important is to enable the poor to stay on the land
and make a decent living.